A black and white barcode is very widely used for recording digital information which is readable by an apparatus in a small space on a printed matter. However, such black and white barcodes have limited abilities in terms of recording information including large data such as a long document or a picture.
Originally black and white barcodes systematically represented data by varying the widths and spacing of parallel lines, and were referred to as linear or one-dimensional. Currently two dimensional barcodes are prevalent, the two dimensional codes use varieties of symbols like rectangles, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns to store information.
As with increase in the storage requirement, color barcodes were introduced, as the color barcodes can store much more information than the black and white barcodes. The black and white barcodes record information using binary encoding, whereas color barcodes encode information using several colors by multi valued recording.
For decoding information from the color barcodes, scanners scan the various colors of the color barcodes. However, as the color barcodes go through usual wear and tear due to their age and/or constant usage, it becomes difficult to distinguish between colors of the color barcode using a scanner. Further, at times, a reference, associated with a color barcode, which is used to decode information encoded in a data of a color barcode also gets degraded over a time, this leads to error/difficulty in decoding the information.
There is therefore a need of an improved color barcode which is durable and enables reliable decoding of information.